I still wake up each morning thinking it can't really be true that Donald Trump will be president of the United States in less than eight weeks. I mean, he's…he's—he's a willfully ignorant crackpot. He's a ridiculous game show host. He's a five-year-old in a 70-year-old body. He's addicted to gossip and TV. He's a trust fund kid who thinks he's a great businessman. He doesn't have the attention span to read an actual book. He loves conspiracy theories. And he's got an ego so fragile it ought to be packed in Styrofoam peanuts.

Today, CNN's Jeff Zeleny said he was looking for evidence that Trump's allegation of massive voter fraud was true. This instantly sent Trump into a furious tantrum, prompting one of his periodic retweet spasms. Let's take a look at who he chose to retweet. First up is @HighonHillcrest:

Who is @HighonHillcrest? Earlier today he tweeted that Mitt Romney is the "worst kind of traitor." A few days ago he wrote this: "When RACIST THUG @angela_rye screams, annoying voice gets higher." (Don Lemon and Van Jones are also racist thugs. Apparently all blacks on CNN are racist thugs.) And this: "FREEDOM OF RELIGION was meant to apply to religions which do NOT advocate killing non-converts." Next up is @JoeBowman12:

Who is @sdcritic? Earlier today, in response to the attack at Ohio State, he tweeted: "#IslamIsADeathCult #IslamIsTheProblem #BanMuslimsNotGuns #BanSharia #IslamIsCancer #Muslims did not come to America to be Americans! WAKEUP!" And: "#OhioState: You MUST understand #studentfeed that #Islamists are barbaric 3rd world monsters ruthless subhumans.America has brought this 2U!" Finally, Trump added a last word of his own:

.@CNN is so embarrassed by their total (100%) support of Hillary Clinton, and yet her loss in a landslide, that they don't know what to do.

What kind of person is so unhinged that even though he won a presidential election, he goes nuts when he's reminded that he lost the popular vote and (a) demands that all his minions start writing sycophantic tweets about his historic landslide victory, (b) continues stewing about it anyway and fabricates an allegation of massive voter fraud perpetrated by the Democratic Party, (c) flips out at an anodyne segment from a CNN reporter about his lies, and (d) spends his evening hunched over his smartphone rounding up a motley crew of racists, nutbags, and teenagers to assure him that he's right?

What kind of person does this? And how easy is it to manipulate someone like this? We have a helluva scary four years ahead of us.

Prepare to be fascinated. Last week I noted that a Texas judge had blocked the Obama administration's new overtime rules. The basic issue here is simple: the law states that you're exempt from overtime rules if you're a "bona fide" executive, administrative, or professional (EAP) employee. But what does that mean? That's up to the Department of Labor, which has always had a two-part test. First, you have to have the actual duties of an EAP employee. Second, there's a salary floor: you have to make more than a certain amount. This is basically designed to keep employers from pretending that someone is an EAP even though they're paying them peanuts.

The previous floor, set in 2004, was $23,660, or about $29,000 in 2014 dollars. The new rule raised that to about $47,000. The judge ruled that was too high. At $23,660, it made sense that no one under that level could possibly be a bona fide EAP. But at $47,000? Maybe they could.

Was the judge right? Jared Bernstein, who's been deeply involved in this issue, writes today that he's not. The basic problem is that the judge accepted the Bush administration's number as gospel without considering the entire history of the salary floor. Adjusted for inflation, here's what it looks like since 1940:1

The new level of $47,000 looks perfectly reasonable in historical context. In fact, it's the 2004 number that looks way out of whack. But what if you use PCE instead of CPI as your inflation measure?

Now it's the $47,000 number that looks like an outlier. Maybe the judge was right?

I don't think so. As a matter of bloggy interest, we can certainly argue whether CPI or PCE (or some other measure) is "best" for measuring long-term inflation. However, they're both widely used and perfectly acceptable in a broad sense. If the Department of Labor uses CPI, that's a reasonable choice, which the court should give deference to under the Chevron rule. Beyond that, if DOL chooses to look at the historical record for the salary floor, rather than solely at the Bush administration's number, that's also reasonable and deserves deference.

Bottom line: the Labor Department set the salary floor in a reasonable way, backed by plenty of empirical evidence. (More empirical evidence than just the historical level of the salary test, I should add.) If anyone was out of line here, it was the Bush administration, not the Obama administration.

1The actual raw numbers are a little tricky to figure out. From 1950 through 1975, DOL used two different salary floors related to a "long test" and a "short test." (Don't ask.) As near as I can tell, the best fit to the previous floors is an average of the two, so that's what I used. Bernstein has more on this here.

I don't know why this popped into my head, but given the enormous growth of cloud computing I got curious about how big a share it is of all computing. Roughly speaking, it turns out that total spending in 2016 is:

So cloud computing currently accounts for about 2.5 percent of all IT hardware and software spending. I have no point to make about this.

1Hardware and software only, not including telecom spending. CompTIA estimates that non-telecom spending is about $2.24 trillion in 2016 and that hardware and software account for about two-thirds of that.

If you want to see a good example of why Trump will struggle to bring back coal, just look at Michigan.

Last weekend, the CEO of Michigan’s largest electric utility reiterated that his company is still planning to retire all eight of its remaining coal plants by 2030 — whether or not Trump tries to repeal President Obama’s climate policies. "All of those retirements are going to happen regardless of what Trump may or may not do with the Clean Power Plan," DTE Energy’s Gerry Anderson told MLive.com’s Emily Lawler.

....In Michigan, a new coal plant costs $133 per megawatt hour. A natural gas plant costs half that. Even wind contracts cost about $74.52 per megawatt hour. "I don't know anybody in the country who would build another coal plant," Anderson said.

If you want this in chart form—and who wouldn't?—here is US coal production in the 21st century:

And that's not the half of it. Coal production has dropped 31 percent from its peak, but coal employment has dropped 41 percent:

Coal executives don't want to employ more miners. They want to automate as much as possible to squeeze the last few profits out of a dying industry. This has nothing to do with Obama's Clean Power Plan, and there's nothing Donald Trump can do about it. Coal is a buggy whip in an automobile era.

Hillary Clinton warned the coal community about this, just like Walter Mondale warned everyone that Reagan would increase their taxes. They were both right, but no one wanted to hear it. They preferred grand promises from charlatans instead.

Is Donald Trump using his Twitter outbursts about the popular vote to distract us from this week's real news: the vast conflicts of interest between his business empire and his upcoming presidency? This question is getting a lot of attention today.

The answer is no. I mean yes. But no, not really. On the other hand, maybe a little bit yes. I'm sorry, what was the question again?

The real answer is the same as it was during the campaign: Trump is dedicated to creating constant uproars all the time. Is this because it's just who he is? Or is it part of an instinctive strategy to keep us from ever paying attention to anything for long, aside from the fact that Trump is in the limelight? I can't say for sure, but I'd put money on the latter.

My belief in this comes mainly from an observation about the campaign: Trump, it turns out, is fully able to focus on something for months at a time if he wants to. And the thing he focused on was "Crooked Hillary" and her emails. That was a constant theme of his campaign, which he hammered on relentlessly for months. And the press assisted, covering every new email revelation—big or small, meaningful or trivial— in blazing headlines on the front page.

And it worked. Sure, he needed a lucky break at the end when James Comey released his letter, but he had set the stage to take advantage of it. This constant drumbeat on a single issue was spectacularly successful.

Trump engaged in a high-risk-high-reward strategy by creating a strong brand identity—for Hillary Clinton. And as any brand manager can tell you, this is crucial. The relentless focus on Hillary Clinton's email hurt her badly by confirming the sense that she was at least mildly corrupt. Trump's scandals were different. The press did cover them, but it was something new every week. This didn't confirm any particular view of Trump aside from his being a bit of a loose cannon. And within a week, each previous scandal was barely remembered. By November, the whole Access Hollywood thing—which was only four weeks old—might as well have been ancient history. It had been practically forgotten.

Donald Trump knows how to focus and he knows how to throw up lots of chaff to keep himself front and center. Does he mean this stuff to be a distraction? Beats me. I suspect it's all intuitive with him. The only good news is that he can wear out his welcome doing this. In his previous life, that wasn't a big problem because the press didn't want to cover him 24/7 anyway. Now they do. He is likely to find that after a few months of this, even his most fervent supporters are a little weary of it.

Today in "Headline Watch," I have generally good news. With the notable exception of the Wall Street Journal, most outlets said right in their headlines that Donald Trump's allegation of illegal voting this afternoon was false. That's pretty good.

Now, for my money, the proper style is something like "Trump Lies Yet Again, Claims Millions of Illegal Votes." The deck should be "This is Trump's 187th absurd lie of 2016." But, you know, baby steps. I understand that mainstream copy desks aren't quite ready to adopt my Updated Style Guide for the Trump Era. But they will be soon.

A few days ago I mentioned that the Trump campaign1 was pretty dedicated to sending Hillary Clinton's popular vote win down the memory hole. To accomplish this, they began a gaslighting offensive to persuade the nation that Donald Trump was one of the biggest winners ever in presidential history. Kellyanne Conway kicked things off by telling Fox News, "This election was not close. It was not a squeaker." Two days later, Trump himself defended his loss of the popular vote: "If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily."

Then Corey Lewandowski upped the ante, claiming that Trump "won the election campaign by the largest majority since Ronald Reagan in 1984." I guess this was a little too raw even for Trumpland, so Reince Priebus beavered away and finally found something to justify Lewandowski's toadying: "Donald J. Trump won over 2,600 counties nationwide, the most since President Reagan in 1984." But that still wasn't enough. The whole popular vote thing is apparently a serious burr in Trump's saddle, and he wasn't happy with all this shilly-shallying. So today he decided to go for broke and insist that he just won, period:

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

So there you have it. It's twisting Trump's guts that more people voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for him. And this whole recount thing in Wisconsin seems to have driven him bananas. The result is a tweet alleging that the Clinton campaign orchestrated millions of illegal votes in 2016.2 This message went out to all 16 million of his followers, who will surely pass it along to another 16 million or so—and then the media will pass it along to yet millions more.

This is an obvious lie, and it will probably take a few hours for Trump's TV shills to figure out how to defend it. That's how it worked with the "thousands of Muslims celebrating on 9/11" thing. In that case, his spear carriers eventually dug up a few internet factoids that provided them with a way to claim that Trump was right, and away they went. I'm sure the same thing will happen this time. I can't wait to see how many will join in and exactly what dreck they'll dredge up to justify it.

Alternatively, they could just admit that the Republican president-elect is an epically insecure liar who will say anything when his fragile ego is bruised. That's not a very appealing alternative, is it?

1As near as I can tell, Trump is still running a campaign.

2Trump says he would have won if not for these votes, so they must have all been for Hillary. And if they were all for Hillary, then Democrats must have been the ones who did the vote rigging. Right?

Top advisers to President-elect Donald Trump escalated their attacks on Mitt Romney on Sunday, catapulting their long-simmering frustrations onto cable news in an extraordinary public airing of grievances.

In a series of interviews on the Sunday political talk shows, Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump aide, argued firmly against tapping Romney for secretary of state...“I’m all for party unity, but I’m not sure that we have to pay for that with the secretary of state position,” Conway said in an interview with CNN. “We don’t even know if Mitt Romney voted for Donald Trump.”

....Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich...“I think there’s nothing that Mitt Romney can say that doesn’t sound phony and frankly pathetic...I think we would be enormously disappointed if he brought Mitt Romney into any position of authority.”

This is pretty remarkable. Presidential staffs always have plenty of infighting, and often that infighting becomes public via anonymous leaks. But I can't recall a transition team that literally went public in its bashing of a potential cabinet pick. So what's going on?

Conway and Gingrich want to influence Trump, and they know the only real way to get his attention is via TV.

This whole thing has been orchestrated by Trump as a way of publicly humiliating Romney.

The Trump inner circle is truly an out-of-control freak show.

I dunno. In the meantime, Trump's cabinet-level appointees so far include a guy who created a platform for the alt-right; an ex-general with delusions of persecution; a deputy who thinks Hillary Clinton sent black helicopters after her; an attorney general who's basically opposed to all laws protecting minorities; a governor with no background for her job; a CIA director who supports more torture and more black sites; a billionaire who wants to destroy public education; and Reince Priebus.

Priebus is probably unqualified to be White House chief of staff, but that's about it. In Trump's world, that makes him a superstar.

I've written a post or two about the main reasons Hillary Clinton lost the election, and I always nod to the fact that there are other, smaller reasons too. One of these smaller reasons is that Clinton herself made mistakes, something that Harold Pollack noted a few days ago. So I asked him what he thought the campaign's three biggest miscues were. He wrote a long post about this, which you should read since it contains a lot of discussion and nuance. In normal bloggy fashion, however, I'm going to ignore all that. Instead, here are Pollack's answers, along with my comments:

Creating the email and speech problems, and being brittle and defensive about cleaning them up. No argument here. We both agree that these problems were wildly overblown by the press, but nonetheless they were problems that Clinton brought on herself. It's all part of her greatest character deficit: pushing rules to the boundaries and then being defensive and secretive about it when her actions come to light. The former is a bad habit, and the latter just makes the press even more ravenous than they'd ordinarily be. It's a toxic combination.

Overconfidence and complacency across the political spectrum. In retrospect, this is obviously true. But even now, this hardly strikes me as a campaign problem per se. Clinton and her fellow Dems were confident because every poll showed them well ahead. I assume that all her internal polling showed the same thing. In the end, though, that polling was apparently off by about 3 points, and more than that in the famous trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That's a big miss.

So what happened to the polls? Did Clinton's internal polling show her way ahead? If so, how did it fail so badly? That's what I'd like to know. I think anybody would have been overconfident if their polling showed them winning in a walk.

Signaling to older rural white voters that we didn’t want them, and indeed would leave them behind. This is hard to assess. There's no question that Democrats have steadily lost the support of the white working class over the past two decades. This is something that goes far beyond Hillary Clinton. But did the white working class leave because they thought Republicans were likely to bring their jobs back and make their lives better? That hardly seems likely, given that during this entire period Republicans have campaigned on a steady diet of corporate deregulation and tax cuts for the rich.

But if that's the case, we're back to optics and race—and Trump appealed explicitly to both. He loudly and persistently pretended to care about the white working class while offering nothing much that would actually affect them. And he was pretty plainly pro-white, which obviously appealed to at least some of them. Clinton's problem is that she isn't cynical enough to do the former and not loathsome enough to do the latter.

Could she still have done more? Of course. Politicians routinely use symbols to demonstrate respect for groups even if their platforms don't offer an awful lot of help at a concrete level. Clinton didn't do that, and it turned out to be a mistake. I can't bring myself to blame her too much for this, since it's all hindsight, but it was still a mistake—and an especially big one since she clearly failed to understand what was happening in three states that were so critical to her that they were called the "blue firewall."

But I do think we should keep our eye on a third possibility....and that would be David Petraeus, who to the world represents America at its strongest and most decisive. He is the guy who saved the Iraq War, and is a man who has written and thought deeply about the new kind of warfare that we are involved in. And that, I think, would be a spectacular choice.

Krauthammer, of course, was part of the chorus claiming that Hillary Clinton had betrayed the republic as Secretary of State because she occasionally discussed the administration's drone program over unclassified email. The emails were all carefully worded; there weren't very many of them; everything in them had almost certainly been widely reported already; there's no evidence that anyone ever hacked them; and James Comey said clearly that it wasn't even a close call to determine that Clinton had done nothing illegal. Nonetheless, she had endangered the country and was obviously unfit to hold office.

But David Petraeus—that's a different story. Petraeus was head of the CIA; he got smitten by an attractive woman; he knowingly and deliberately passed along classified information to her; he tried to hide the email trail; and he was eventually convicted of mishandling classified information as part of a plea deal. For all I know, he may literally be unable to get a security clearance any longer.

But he would be a "spectacular" choice for Hillary Clinton's old job. Good God.

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, Krauthammer was also one of the conservatives who embraced the conspiracy theory that Obama used Petraeus's affair to blackmail Petraeus into giving favorable testimony on Benghazi. So who knows what really goes through that head of his.